For all our many current problems, we are hardly a totalitarian society, and I find it really offensive that you would seek to equate our country with "some of the crueler totalitarian regimes of history."

Because I can assure you, were that actually the case, you certainly wouldn't be posting such comments -- at least, not for very long. Rather, I reckon that either you'd find yourself being held in some undisclosed locale pending charges of subversion or misprision of treason, or you'd be sustenance for the crustaceans prowling the bottom of the Hudson River or Chesapeake Bay.

Offering up such overheated false equivalencies only serves to undercut your own arguments, many of which are otherwise often quite valid, because it makes you sound both irrational and intemperate. That tends to turn most people off, to the point where you end up preaching only to a very small choir of like-minded individuals. That's hardly the way to effect any sort of meaningful change.

Cassandra may have had the gift of prophecy, but Troy was still heedless of her warnings about its fate, because its denizens thought her to be a crackpot.

Nelson Mandela's native language was Xhosa. He learned English in order to become a lawyer, and then Afrikaans while he was imprisoned on Robben Island, so that he could converse with his jailers. South Africa's current president, Jacob Zuma, is Zulu.

The overwhelming majority of South Africans I met during my time there were multilingual. As you can imagine, communications can be rather complex, and people do make a great effort to accommodate one another in that regard. I can't imagine what it's like to sign for the hearing impaired with so many languages.

What you said should really go without saying -- or one would certainly hope so, at least here if nowhere else.